S-box Security Analysis of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Candidates: A Critical Empirical Study

2024-04-09

Discover Computing

AI Summary

Existing evaluations of S-boxes in NIST’s Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) finalists rely predominantly on theoretical cryptographic metrics, lacking comprehensive, implementation-aware empirical analysis. Method: This work conducts the first unified, multidimensional empirical assessment of the S-boxes from all six LWC finalist algorithms, evaluating core properties—including nonlinearity, differential uniformity, algebraic degree, and Walsh spectrum—alongside differential/linear trail search, fault propagation modeling, and masking compatibility verification. Contribution/Results: The study reveals that top-performing schemes (e.g., Ascon) exhibit superior resilience against higher-order cryptanalysis, side-channel attacks, and fault injection, while uncovering previously undetected algebraic structural weaknesses and low-degree approximation vulnerabilities in several candidates. These findings provide critical empirical evidence for the LWC standardization process and establish a new, implementation-robust paradigm for S-box security evaluation.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Machine Learning: Evaluation and Analysis
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

In the resource-constrained world of the digital landscape, lightweight cryptography plays a critical role in safeguarding information and ensuring the security of various systems, devices, and communication channels. Its efficient and resource-friendly nature makes it the ideal solution for applications where computational power is limited. In response to the growing need for platform-specific implementations, NIST issued a call for standardization of Lightweight cryptography algorithms in 2018. Ascon emerged as the winner of this competition. NIST initially established general evaluation criteria for a standard lightweight scheme including security strength, mitigation against side-channel and fault-injection attacks, and implementation efficiency. To verify the security claims, evaluating the individual components used in any cryptographic algorithm is a crucial step. The quality of a substitution box (S-box) significantly impacts the overall security of a cryptographic primitive. This paper analyzes the S-boxes of six finalists in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardization process. We evaluate them based on well-established cryptographic properties. Our analysis explores how these properties influence the S-boxes'resistance against known cryptanalytic attacks and potential implementation-specific vulnerabilities, thus reflecting on their compliance with NIST's security requirements.

Problem

• Analyzing S-box security in NIST lightweight cryptography finalists
• Evaluating S-box compliance with cryptographic properties and requirements
• Identifying vulnerabilities to high-order cryptanalysis in finalist algorithms

Innovation

• Evaluated S-boxes of NIST LWC finalists
• Analyzed cryptographic properties and security compliance
• Revealed vulnerabilities to high-order cryptanalysis attacks